Fight the Power

A group of Highlands Ranch homeowners is not exactly thrilled with the hum of progress and has filed suit against Public Service Company of Colorado, saying that the company should bury its noisy power lines.

The lines were recently upgraded to provide added juice to Park Meadows mall and the surrounding area, and as soon as the juice was turned up in October, Mark Van Wyk, whose home is near the lines, says the noise was not only noticeable, it was obnoxious. “It was creaking and buzzing and humming,” Van Wyk says. “It sounded like something out of a science-fiction movie.”

Old-style lattice towers had been replaced months earlier with giant single-pole models along a four-mile stretch south of Park Meadows, but the wires in the open space behind his house hadn’t concerned Van Wyk.

“The wires never bothered us,” Van Wyk says. He and his wife, Erica, moved into “the house we’ve always wanted” in January. But when Public Service turned up the juice, the wires began to matter.

What had happened was this: Public Service doubled the power going through the two lines from 115 kilovolts to 230 kilovolts each, according to company documents. A spokesman says this is a part of the electric company’s efforts to get more power to Park Meadows as well as other businesses and homes in fast-growing Douglas County.

For the Van Wyks and others who live along the lines, the power increase meant constant noise. “It turned our lives around,” Van Wyk says. That’s why they say they are waging a war with Public Service, doing everything they can to get the company to turn down the voltage or bury the power lines.

But homeowners haven’t been the only ones disturbed by the noise. Henry Campbell says he regularly sat on his deck and watched hawks and other birds on and near the lines. “This big old brown hawk would sit up there looking for his dinner,” says Campbell. Since the voltage was doubled, Campbell says, he hasn’t seen the hawk once. He says he’s also seen a drop in the number of people jogging, pushing strollers and walking their dogs along a trail that runs under the lines. “It used to be pretty popular, and now I don’t see anybody on that trail,” Campbell says.

Campbell joined with Van Wyk and more than sixty other families in a group that initially tried to solve the problem by meeting with Public Service officials.

But the meetings, letters and phone calls went nowhere, Van Wyk says, so he and his neighbors filed a class-action lawsuit in Douglas County District Court on December 12. “We’re not suing for the money; we just want our lives back,” Van Wyk says. The suit asks Public Service to pay damages determined by a jury, but Van Wyk says he would prefer to drop the suit if the company would just agree to bury the lines.

Public Service officials won’t comment on the suit. One letter, though, shows that the company acknowledges the problem.

The letter–from Ross King, a Public Service vice president, to Michael Cooke, the Douglas County commissioner whose district includes the power lines–notes that the company checked out the complaints. That investigation found that the “performance of the transmission line is not meeting our expectations.” The letter goes on to promise that new equipment will be installed to try to mitigate the noise.

Cooke says that for her, that’s an adequate reply. “The conductors are unreasonably noisy, but I’ve been pleased with the response,” Cooke says. She says she is willing to wait and see if Public Service improves the situation.

The homeowners are not feeling so generous, however, in part because of another sentence in that same letter: “As has been stated before, 230kv electric transmission lines operating at this altitude and air density produce audible noise, especially during high humidity conditions,” King wrote.

“If they are always going to make noise, why don’t they just bury them?” asks Campbell. He says he spent thousands of dollars on a backyard deck and hot tub, which he used year-round until October. “There’s nothing better than sitting in your hot tub in the snow,” he says. “It’s kind of magical.” But the noise has driven him inside. “You can’t stay out there at all, the noise is so obnoxious,” he says.

Campbell agrees with Van Wyk that the case is not about money. If Public Service wrote him a check, it wouldn’t make the noise stop. “I really don’t plan on going anywhere,” Campbell says.

The lines aren’t going anywhere, either, if Public Service’s track record is any indication.

The power company has already won one court battle to install the 230-kilovolt line. When the plan was still on the drawing board, Douglas County sued to stop it in 1989. Even then, one of the claims in the suit was that the lines would be too loud. The county also claimed that the lines would interfere with the county open-space plan.

Douglas County won its case in district court, but Public Service appealed and eventually won in a ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court in 1992.

The homeowners’ lawyer, Tony Leffert, insists that things won’t go as well for Public Service this time around.

“The issues are completely different,” Leffert says. “There’s no question that they have a legal right to build the line, but now that it is there, we have an entire new set of questions.”

The six-page suit says that Public Service has made an “unlawful taking” of the homeowners’ property, because the noise makes part of the homes unlivable. The suit also claims that the noise is in essence trespassing onto the homeowners’ property and that the company was negligent when it installed lines that officials knew would be as loud as they are.

Leffert says the lines have had a sharp impact on the marketability of the property. “People come out to look at these homes for sale and they don’t even get out of the car,” Leffert says.

Van Wyk says one neighbor who moved out in the weeks after the noise started is now trying to sell his house but hasn’t had any offers.

Leffert adds that Public Service may have figured out how much a suit would cost the company and decided that the amount would still be less than the cost of burying the lines.

Leffert says the official word from Public Service is that burying the lines–at an estimated cost of $16 million–would benefit only a few people and could cost the company’s shareholders some dividends. Campbell says that answer just isn’t good enough. “They are the ones making all the money off that line,” he says, “but we’re the ones who have to suffer the consequences.